Brown trainers
The Cameron Highlands afford a welcome relief from the sweltering heat of the Malaysian coast and were used for precisely that back in the days when the map was coloured pink. Today they're part of the Asian backpacker trail and you can go hill climbing and visiting tea plantations if you go there.

Unfortunately, getting there requires a bus trip and I was feeling distinctly uneasy when I settled into my seat at 10pm for the bus ride up. One reason I was feeling uneasy was the curry I'd just eaten in Ipoh, which I could tell was planning to cause havoc with me in due course. The other reason I felt uneasy was the presence of the sick bag attached to the back of the seat in front of me. A sick bag? On a bus?

It turns out there are something like 470 hairpin bends on the road up to the Cameron Highlands and in the dark you can't fix on the horizon.

After half an hour of those bends I'd already filled one bag with vile-smelling puke, I was drip white, shaking like a leaf and drenched in sweat. But the bus was just beginning. I lost count of the number of sick bags I swiped from other seats, they were quite small and I was heaving up soupy-lumpy vomit like a discount Mr Creosote. Because of the constant lurching of the bus as it went round corners, a not inconsiderable amount of said vomit was deposited on the floor, on the seat and on myself. At least three other passengers were inspired by my performance enough to join me in wretching their own guts up but we had the sympathy of the driver who was grinning his brown leathery face off in his rear view at us all.

He deposited the acrid-smelling bunch of us off in the middle of Tanah Ratah village at 1am. Everybody wandered off to their various guesthouses they'd had planned. Unsurprisingly nobody was eager to share a room with me so I went to a separate guesthouse and roused the grumpy owner who grudgingly allowed this shivering, carrot covered foreigner to have one of his rooms.

Just in the nick of time too. The trip up had been that long that the curry had worked it's way through my digestive tract as if it were a ticking bomb passed hand to hand. I'd just squat down on the Asian hole in the floor bog when the Krakatoa of liquid shits erupted from my arseparts. Fucking hell, it was like I had a pressure hose on a tanker of diarrhoea and my thumb partly over the nozzle. About half of the pungent slurry made it into the crapper, the remainder went over the floor, my calves, my shorts and my trainers. I shat for a good few minutes, feeling fainter by the second, wiped, flushed then stumbled into the shower in all my clothes.

I was ill for four days. Climbed no hills. Saw no tea plantations. I saw a squat toilet and the shop which sold toilet rolls and that's it. The clothes cleaned up and you could only faintly smell the puke.

The trainers were still brown though. They had to be chucked.
(Dildo Bugger destroyed a ring on, Fri 15 Aug 2014, 22:11, 3 replies)

Have a click for "discount Mr Creosote".

( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 15 Aug 2014, 22:31, closed)

Ipoh?
Ipoo more like
( rachelswipe with a fork, Sat 16 Aug 2014, 10:25, closed)

I had a similar experience in Kenya.
My sympathies.
( spanishfly is so fucking sexy people impersonate him, Tue 19 Aug 2014, 11:08, closed)